A Marfa Dozen

Ever since 1972, when New Yorker Donald Judd picked up his minimalist canvases and sculptures and planted them decisively in the unlikely town of Marfa, in West Texas, artists of all ages, origins, movements, and media have been flocking to the area that is now a flourishing American art mecca. Vanity Fair takes a tour through the vital contributions that 12 creative minds have brought to this desert melting pot at various points in its 40-year history as an art destination—names that bear a diversity of influence but nonetheless all bear one thing in common: a deep-seated loyalty to the land and legacy Judd left behind.

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Elmgreen & Dragset

One expects to encounter the Milanese fashion brand’s storefronts in such chic locations as Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and Paris’s Rue Saint-Honoré, but what about finding a Prada boutique just off U.S. Highway 90, a mile west of Valentine, Texas? Such is what the Scandinavian-born, Berlin-based artist collaborators Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset set out to achieve in the fall of 2005 with their permanently installed sculpture aptly entitled Prada Marfa, which actually stands some 30 miles outside of Marfa. The boutique’s resemblance to its major-city counterparts, however, is purely external; visitors are not invited to enter the installation. And how does designer Miuccia Prada feel about the work of art, which features pieces from her fall collection in the windows? The answer is easy: she picked the shoes herself.

Rackstraw Downes

The plein-air painter is best known for his realist landscapes of often decrepit outdoor scenes, in particular Four Spots Along a Razor-Wire Fence, August–November (ASOTSPRIE), which he completed at Coney Island in 1999. Transporting his distinctive technique to Marfa in 1998, Downes proceeded to render multipaneled panoramas, oil-on-canvas depictions of various structures throughout West Texas, from the interior of a bull barn, to oil rigs, to a water-flow-monitoring station. Born in Kent, England, Downes now favors spending time between New York City and the dry warmth of Presidio County.

Jeff Elrod

Unlike the vast majority of artists who have flocked to the Marfa art scene over the years, painter (and Chinati artist-in-residence in 1998) Jeff Elrod is a native Texan who, after attending grad school abroad, made his way back south (this time to West Texas), where he now lives and works to this day. Even more unique than his provenance, though, is his medium: using computer-based digital painting, or what he refers to as Frictionless Drawing, Elrod begins his process with vector-based graphics software and a standard computer mouse. The abstract images are then transferred and made tangible with acrylic paint and ink.

Dan Flavin

In 1964, Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in New York City hosted Dan Flavin’s solo exhibition of the multicolored fluorescent-light fixtures for which he would later become famous. The inspiration to arrange these ready-made, industrial materials to create a distinct ocular experience occurred to the artist while on his shift as a guard at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History three years earlier. He would eventually go on to showcase his work across Europe and North America, and by the mid-1990s he had illuminated Marfa with his large-scale, fluorescent-light sculptures in six buildings within the Chinati Foundation. The artist passed away in November 1996, leaving his assistants to complete his final commissioned, site-specific piece in Richmond Hall of the Menil Collection in Houston.

John Wesley

“A cool, psychological oddness”: such is the quality Donald Judd approvingly observes in John Wesley’s paintings in an essay in the April 1963 issue of Arts magazine. Judd later recruited the Los Angeles–born Pop-Surrealist artist, his own close friend, to his artist-in-residence program in 1989. On permanent display in a former stable at Chinati, Wesley’s paintings use bold swaths of color within black borders to convey a cartoon-like simplicity of depiction, as evidenced in these four works from the Fredericks & Freiser gallery in New York that showcase the continuity of his characteristic aesthetic from the early 1960s to the 21st century:* Suzanne and the Lugosis* (1972), Western Women (1983), Good Night (1998), and Mexican Movie (2002).

Robert Irwin

The 83-year-old Los Angeles native sees each of the works he has created during his over-half-century-long career as having far more than mere ocular value. Having started out as an Abstract Expressionist painter, in the 1960s he began experimenting with the media of light and space to craft entire interior environments meticulously designed to give his audience a distinct multi-sensory experience. Using both natural- and artificial-light sources, reflections and shadows, colorless palettes and clean lines, his installations have been displayed in major museums, public spaces, and institutions across the United States and Europe. Irwin’s 2006 installation Untitled (Four Walls) in a U-shaped temporary exhibition space at the Chinati Foundation reflected his fondness for the West Texas enclave where he first arrived by accident in the 1970s, driving down from Los Angeles and along the Rio Grande in search of warmer climes.

Justin Lowe, Jonah Freeman, and Alexandre Singh

From April through August of 2008, three young artists came together to construct a radical examination of the 1960s counterculture (which, it is worth noting, of course pre-dates them all) through the subject of alchemy and drugs. Hello Meth Lab in the Sun at the contemporary-art space Ballroom Marfa filled several gallery rooms with stage-like, interior representations of three concepts: hippie utopianism, crystal meth, and modern industry. The show, replete with gas masks, empty soda bottles, worn shag rugs, and open boxes of cold medicine, combined the creative input of two current New Yorkers who had collaborated previously on a series of collages—Santa Fe–born Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, from Dayton, Ohio—as well as the French-born British artist Alexandre Singh. Each member of the trio roots his artistic endeavors in architecture but from a unique perspective: Freeman deals mostly in the photographic and video arts, Lowe arranges whole environments and spaces for his installations, and Singh fuses commonplace materials with industrial ones to build his structures, which often involve a performative component.

Sam Schonzeit

The mastermind behind the subscription project entitled “Would You Like to Receive a Daily Photo of Me at Work?,” a collection of amateur desk-side self-takes ranging from the playful to the impudent that eventually got him fired from his job at an architecture firm, Sam Schonzeit also launched a monthly postcard service in April 2011, mailing cards with unique images (such as a transparent “envelope” containing potato chips) to subscribers at varied prices based on the individual’s net income. Despite the informality of these endeavors, Schonzeit also has a more serious vein of artistic sensibility in his blood. Having grown up the son of painter Ben Schonzeit in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in the 1970s, he moved to Marfa following his graduate studies in architecture to become an elementary-school art teacher and a docent at the Chinati Foundation. Never himself an artist-in-residence, Schonzeit harbors the utmost respect for the title, telling V.F.: “the existence of the residency is important in understanding the ethos of Marfa . . . it provides us—the people who are more or less consistently in Marfa—with a window to the outside world.”

Charline von Heyl

She was born in Germany and lives in New York, but von Heyl escapes with her husband, artist Christopher Wool, for a good part of each year to her studio in Marfa, where she too served as a Chinati Foundation artist-in-residence in 2008. Her work is motivated in large part by the solitude and downtime afforded to her by the West Texas landscape—a far cry from the streets of her other home in Manhattan. The painter avoids bouts of artist’s block—she has admitted to suffering months-long dry spells in her southern enclave—by simply not thinking too hard: “I just put something on canvas, I try out what happens, see if it has this playful quality that’s going to take me somewhere new,” she told Modern Painters’ Claire Barliant in 2009. And the strategy works: year after year von Heyl turns out collections that travel from her spot in seclusion to the most selective exhibition spaces across the globe.